Five Best Sunday Columns

Dana Milbank on How Donald Trump Reveals GOP Desperation.
At CPAC, on of the most important Republican events of the year,
Republicans cheered wildly when Donald Trump said he was considering a
run for president in 2012. Trump declared "These are my people!" but are
they? Last time he considered a candidacy, he was pro-choice,
pro-campaign finance reform and pro-universial health care. He's been
married three times and contributed to Democrats. Writing in The
Washington Post, Milbank argues,
"Trump's gambit is almost certainly a publicity stunt. What makes it
interesting is how eager the conservatives were to embrace him, shifting
the afternoon's schedule at the last minute when he agreed to appear.
It speaks to the Republican Party's leadership vacuum: Only a party
deeply dissatisfied with its current slate of candidates would swoon for
this guy."

Melik Kaylan on Why Iran Banned Valentine's Day.
Sometimes it seems like Iran's government thinks its job is to be a
buzzkill: Last month it outlaws Valentine's Day and all the pink-and-red
stuff that goes with it. The Wall Street Journal's Kaylan
explains, "The Iranian state has pronounced against unauthorized
mingling of the sexes, rap music, rock music, Western music, women
playing in bands, too-bright nail polish, laughter in hospital
corridors... The regime's posture turns the smallest garden-variety
gestures into thrilling acts of subversion. Slipping a Valentine card to
a girlfriend takes on the significance of samizdat. ... The mullahs
have appointed themselves the enemy of fun; as a result, wherever fun
herniates into view, it is a politicized irruption of defiance." No
authority, Kaylan says, has ever won the war against fun.

Noah Feldman on How the Supreme Court Has Always Been Political.
Antonin Scalia has taken heat for meeting with conservative lawmakers
and donors, and the Tea Party activities of his wife. But Feldman explains
in The New York Times that the justices have always dabbled in
politicking. In fact,
it was only during Watergate, when the justices had the power to take
down a president, that they decided to act more politically aloof. "The
disengagement from public life that followed has had real costs.
Isolated justices make isolated decisions. It is difficult to imagine
justices who drank regularly with presidents deciding that a lawsuit
against a sitting executive could go forward while he was in office, or
imagining that the suit would not take up much of the president’s time.
Yet that is precisely what the court did by a 9-to-0 vote in the 1997
case of Clinton v. Jones. The court’s mistaken practical judgment opened
the door to President Bill Clinton’s testimony about Monica Lewinsky
and the resulting impeachment that preoccupied the government for more
than two years as Osama bin Laden laid his plans."

George Will on How to Cut the Defense Budget.
America spends a lot of money on the military: about as much as the rest
of the world combined, six times more than No. 2 spender China. Since fiscal 2001, the military's baseline budget has shot up 80
percent, to $534 billion--but in reality, it spends even more than that. The GOP's support for a
strong military "sometimes measured simply by the size of the Pentagon's
budget," Will writes
in the Washington Post, but new Tea Party members want to cut military spending. In recent hearings, GOP Rep. Randy
Forbes exasperatedly groused it was impossible to find inefficiencies in
the Defense Department budget because it doesn't comply with laws that
require auditable financial statements. If Republicans want to cut the
defense budget, Will writes, first they need to figure out what's in it.

Joanna Weiss on Why Planned Parenthood Is a Bad Target for Pro-Lifers. Lila Rose went undercover to try to catch Planned
Parenthood employees covering up underage abortions. The results were
sensational. But if Rose wants to stop abortions, Weiss writes
in the Boston Globe, she picked the wrong target. "The group’s annual $79 million in Title X funds, now
in the crosshairs of House Republicans, wouldn’t go to abortions, which
already are barred from federal funding except in the case of rape,
incest, or life endangerment — and which make up only 3 percent of the
services Planned Parenthood performs." It's clinics do a lot of breast
and cervical cancer screening, plus STD prevention, which reduces
unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Everyone has someone on their holiday shopping list who’s impossible to buy for. For the second year in a row, we asked Atlantic readers to describe their someone, and brainstormed a few perfect gift ideas for them.